After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.

I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.

Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)

  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]English
    5·
    11 days ago

    I’m curious (in a genuine, friendly way) what you read that led you to anarchism over Marxism-Leninism. Was it a theoretical text that reverberated particularly well with you, historical texts that you felt made anarchism a more justifiable position than MLism, something else entirely?

    Two things:

    1. I am autistic with severe trust issues. Not to imply that autistic ==> anarchist, but IMO I “inherited” a great deal of skepticism and distrust from growing up autistic in AmeriKKKa, where basically every interaction is lies all day every day, and systems are optimally designed to maximize capitalist oppression. And frankly, I am not looking for new masters since I already hate the masters I have. So it’s going to be very difficult to rationally convince me that any state is worth supporting, even one that labels itself a dictatorship of the proletariat, or even (especially!) groups that claim to agree with me.

    2. Statistically speaking, anarchism has helped me navigate the world and predict to sufficient accuracy how things are gonna go down in the fields where it applies. If you told me that MLism has statistically helped you like anarchism has helped you, I’d believe you because we all have different experiences, and I guess that’s just how the dice rolled.